Saturday, October 11, 2014

Riders on the Storm

I
will miss Sam McCain. He's the lawyer/detective who thinks he's
Robert Ryan. Word on the street is that Riders on the Storm will be his
final adventure solving murders in his Iowa hometown. If this is true
I don't know what I shall do, because after accompanying him through
all ten of his adventures I've begun to think I'm
Sam McCain.

Perfectly
understandable, I think, identifying with this small-town hero,
considering that I grew up in a Midwest town about the same size and
character as Black River Falls. And I grew up in my town about the
same time Sam does in his. The voice is nice, too. Sam narrates these
cases, and by George if he doesn't sound a lot like me!

I
don't get the impression Sam wrote these books from today's
perspective, either, trying to recall what happened way back when.
They're fresh, as if he put the words down on real typewriter paper
shortly after they happened. I can only assume novelist Ed Gorman,
whose name appears on the covers, found a cache of manuscripts
stashed in some dusty rolltop desk in an antique store and has simply
been feeding them into a modern digital word-processing thingamajig.
Either that or he
is really Sam McCain. It can get confusing trying to figure all this
out, just as it gets confusing for Sam trying to figure out who the
killer is without getting killed himself.

You
see, one of the reasons I like Sam so much I sometimes think I'm him
is that he doesn't pretend to be a hero. In fact he gets embarrassed
with all the attention showered on him when he does happen to act
heroically, which occurs at least once in every single case. He
sometimes carries his dad's old .45 but I'm not sure he's ever fired
it. He
gets shot, twice, in Riders
on the Storm. I
shouldn't say any more about that, however, especially whether he
makes it or not. After all, I've already leaked the rumors that this
manuscript is the last one in Gorman's stash.

This
is not to say there isn't another one or two that might have fallen
behind the drawer in that dusty rolltop. Even if Sam buys it (as
detectives said back then) in this one the stories need not be read
in sequence. Each can stand on its own. Should Gorman find another
one or two nothing really would be lost.

I
read them all out of order. The first in the series, The
Day the Music Died, I
devoured after reading three or four of the others. I started with
the third, Will You Still
Love Me Tomorrow?, which
takes place in 1959. You might be catching the drift here that the
title of each story pinpoints the year it took place. Your catch
would be right on the money. And it's not just the titles. The novels
are chock full of real history. Will
You Still Love Me Tomorrow?,
for example,openswith Soviet Premier
Nikita Krushchev's famous visit to Roswell Garst's Iowa farm.

Your
kids tell you their American history class is boring them to death?
Get them the Sam McCain history series. They'll ace the exam for the
period 1959-71, and be the life of any Rock-n-Roll theme party to
boot.

For
regular McCain readers, Riders
on the Storm hasa
somberer tone than the others, and that's even before Sam gets shot.
It's set right smack amid the Vietnam War malaise. Sam and his
friends, the whole town of Black River Falls—in fact the entire
country—all are torn asunder by a war it seems only the politicians
and those who make money off of war really want. A sad time. And Sam
gets shot. Will he live to ride again? To write again?

Or
will we have to persuade Ed Gorman to thrust his arm back into that
dusty rolltop one more time?